...the media never really represents the tuba-playing, soccer-playing, science-loving,
bird-watching girl because she's just not an easy sell.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

More Fun In Ex-Catholicdom

Another day, another couple of flights of stairs further down into irrelevance for the Holy Church.

These things do not upset me any more, nor do they surprise me. With each successive outburst, be it a Vatican flunky blaming birth control-spiked female urine for male impotence or the pope haughtily calling global gag rule-rescinding President Obama arrogant, the layers are peeled back just a little bit more on true nature and the lie is given to protestations about the dignity of individuals.

The most recent dust-up came courtesy of an excommunicated British priest reinstated over the weekend by Papa Ratzi; the Brit and three others had been booted for being ordained by some crazy-ass ultraconservative archbishop who broke away from the church in '69 because he didn't like the changes brought about by Vatican II. One of these changes was presented in an encyclical that said Catholics had to be nice to Jews and stop calling them Christ-killers and stuff. The Brit, one Bishop Richard Williamson, apparently has troubles with this one, given his propensity for Holocaust denial (eh, only a couple thousand Jews were killed, and none of them gassed, and if any stray ones did happen to be gassed it totally wasn't Hitler's idea) and Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theories (they started the first two world wars and are trying to start the third one right now, which by the way they kicked off by blowing up the World Trade Center in a controlled demolition).

The Vatican officially cleared its throat yesterday after that little awk-ward! moment and reminded the world that the former Hitlerjugend pope does not have an anti-Semitic bone in his body and expects the rest of the church, including Bishop Williamson, to follow suit. Williamson's still back on the roster, though, without having to sit out any games for conduct violating team rules.

But is there more? Oh, of course there's more. The Vatican only got its Prada panties in a wad over Williamson's reams of anti-Semitic comments. His anti-gay comments? They're giggling right along. Way back in '97, Williamson wrote a piece for the Saint Pius X Society newsletter--we've talked about this little group of nutters before--about homosexuality. Apparently feeling no compunction to parrot the usual lines about respecting the dignity of all God's children, he found that line between dignity and deprecation which is usually demarcated by gay=pedophile and vaulted right over it with miles to spare.

However, God did not wait for the founding of the Catholic Church to instill in men the horror of this sin, but he implanted in the human nature of all of us, unless or until we corrupt it, an instinct of violent repugnance for this particular sin, comparable to our instinctive repugnance for other misuses of our human frame, such as coprophagy.

Therefore what is "innate", or in-born, in human nature concerning homosexuality is a violent repugnance.

He could have stopped there, really, with his poo argument wrapped up in at least the veneer of polite society with the standard detached scholarly language and ecclesiastical syntax of all pastoral documents, whether they come from the pope or the parish priest or a schismatic bishop. But instead, he bizarrely veered off into what I can only describe as the contra argument presented in gayface.

Awesome. At first I thought he was doing Princess Bride for some unfathomable reason, but no, he's lisping. Right there in the middle of his very grave and dignified statement. Faggotth? Really? Did the Vatican repudiate any of these statements? Even the bit about coprophagy (seriously?), for fuck's sake? Um, no. No, the Vatican did not.

And for that I say thank you. Really, thank you. Thanks for showing your true colors. Don't even try to brush this guy under the rug or yammer about him not really representing the church's teaching about the very subtle difference between calling a person's innate nature repugnantly ticket-to-hell stamping and calling the person himself repugnant and hellbound. And don't say he was only mincing and lisping for effect while he was still in his state of schism and therefore not really Catholic. You own this bastard part and parcel for as long as you keep him, and the lack of an official wrist-slap rebuke that the church loves and respects all human beings, even the faggotth, speaks volumes. It's nothing we didn't already know, but it never hurts to be reminded.